Case Number 02879

PERSONAL VELOCITY

The Charge

"We all have our own personal velocity."

Opening Statement

Personal Velocity is Rebecca Miller's (daughter of playwright Arthur
Miller) film adaptation of her own book of the same name, a collection of seven
thematically related stories about women pushing towards epiphany and, in the
process, reinventing their own lives. The film adapts two of the seven stories
and offers up a brand new one.

Facts of the Case

1. Delia -- Played by Kyra Sedgwick (Singles), Delia is a
former high school slut, now married, who takes her kids and flees from her
abusive husband to a friend's place in upstate New York. We watch her pain as
she tries to let go of her love for her husband and begin a new life.

2. Greta -- Slaving away editing cookbooks, Greta's (Parker Posey,
Best In Show) career takes a sudden upswing when successful author Thavi
Matola requests her as the editor of his forthcoming novel. Her ambition
ignited, Greta finds herself behaving like the high-powered father she resents
and pulling away from her salt-of-the-earth mediocrity of a husband.

3. Paula -- As the story opens, newly-pregnant Paula (Fairuza Balk,
Almost Famous) picks up a young, gaunt hitchhiker. In a state of shock
from having been witness to an accident in which a man walking beside her on the
street was hit and killed by a car, Paula struggles to regain her grasp on
reality. When she realizes the hitchhiking boy is a runaway who's been severely
beaten, her caring for him brings into focus the future course of her life.

The Evidence

Upon entering, Personal Velocity looks like a soapbox film, a didactic
mess, a forum for the director to air all the women-as-victims beefs that set
the agenda in university Women's Studies programs. Its title and cover art
suggest a film in which intellectual concepts and political stances move about
in the guise of women, resolute, self-actualized. It might, in other words, be
the Lifetime movie to end all Lifetime movies. It certainly deals with women
struggling to find themselves, one abused by her husband, one ruthlessly selfish
in her pursuit of career, one pregnant, confused, her mother's affection usurped
by a jerk of a stepfather. Rebecca Miller has an eye for detail, though, and a
taste for nuance. She's never so crass to sacrifice the humanity of her
characters in the name of reductive moralizing.

In Delia, it's not the morality, politics, or gender inequality of
spousal abuse that fascinates Miller -- that's the stuff of textbooks and
academic journals -- it's the fact that Delia loves her husband, whether he hits
her or not. Miller seeks to show us the moment at which her heroine accepts
that, for her own welfare as well as her children's, she must leave her husband
forever even though it means letting go the good times as well as the bad. What
Miller explores is why it's so difficult to make a decision that's so cleanly
rational, a no-brainer for anyone outside the emotion involved. But Delia
grieves. Sedgwick plays the role passionately, honestly. And Miller makes us
watch it all in long takes broken only by flashbacks to the happy and hurtful
moments of a marriage on its way towards collapse.

Greta turns the myth of the ambitious, self-actualizing woman on its
head by presenting us a character aware of her own selfishness as her career
advances and her marriage crumbles. Miller makes no excuses for her hard-driving
heroine. That she's abandoning a decent husband because he doesn't fit with the
literati and power-brokers among whom she now flits is both despicable and
inevitable. In an expertly understated performance, Parker Posey expresses
Greta's pain at having to choose at all. Whether or not she's made the right
decision is anyone's guess.

"[The film's producer Gary Winick] was talking about how it would be
a pity to lose the language of the stories, and I thought maybe using narration
would unify the three and also give you that third dimension where you know more
about the characters than they know themselves..." -- Rebecca Miller,
In Conversation

And so we come to Personal Velocity's greatest flaw. Even before
watching the featurette in which Miller makes that statement, I could feel that
the voice-over narration was rooted in a lack of willingness to let go of the
prose -- the words upstaged what I was seeing on screen. Delia in
particular suffers from too much telling and not enough showing. Miller's prose
is strong, but film is a visual medium and large portions of Delia feel
like a book on tape punctuated with images. Greta presents a more
successful integration, rarely telling us something without also showing, but
that only serves to make one question whether the narration is necessary at all:
if I'm seeing her past, do I need it explained to me also?

What's particularly frustrating is that Miller's is not a case of a writer
pretending to direct although she's unqualified. Despite her literary pedigree,
she proves quite capable of telling a story visually. She's got a firm grasp on
film convention, as well as a respect for the life and vitality an actor brings
to the words on a page. She was, I'm guessing, too close to the material to make
a complete success of adapting it from one medium to another.

"So then I wrote 'Paula'. It was the only story I wrote knowing that
it might be part of the film." -- Rebecca Miller, In
Conversation

This, too, was obvious before Miller stated it in the featurette because
Paula works so much better than the other two segments. It's far more
grounded in the present tense, its occasional glimpses into the past expressed
visually. Narration kicks off the segment, but quickly fades away, never to
return...and one doesn't miss it a bit.

Fairuza Balk benefits tremendously from the narration-free environment. Her
performance is strongest because it's allowed to speak for itself. Nearly
everything we know about Paula we learn through Balk's eyes, mannerisms, voice,
and the way she responds to the messes thrown at her. That her performance
stands above the excellent work of both Sedgwick and Posey is not only a
testament to the more cinematic approach taken in Paula, but also to
Balk's talent and skill. Outshining her co-stars is no mean feat.

Personal Velocity, a product of InDigEnt (Independent Digital
Entertainment, a subsidiary of the Independent Film Channel) was shot on the fly
with small, handheld digital video cameras. The effect is an image that's
sometimes soft and carries a fair amount of grain. It's certainly inferior to
the resolution of 35mm, but I'm not sure that's a fair comparison. Shooting
Personal Velocity on 35mm stock wouldn't have been possible on its
micro-budget. A more appropriate comparison would be to 16mm film, and I think
the digital video comes out on top in that case. Ellen Kuras's (Summer of
Sam, Blow) cinematography is artful, as is Sabine Hoffman's editing,
giving the film a visual power and beauty that belies its low budget. The DVD
transfers -- one in the original theatrical aspect ratio of 1.85:1, the other
full screen -- appear perfect, any grain and pixelation rooted in the
source.

The Dolby Digital 5.1 audio could just as well be stereo. There's nothing
wrong with it, but it's far from dynamic.

The disc comes with an impressive amount of extras for such a small film. We
get two commentaries: one with Miller, the other with Kuras and gaffer John
Nadeau. Miller's is dry and fairly boring. She's so much more engaging as she
chats with Posey and Balk in the In Conversation featurette, I wish those
two had been included in the chat track. Kuras's and Nadeau's track is more
technical, focusing on the logistics and challenges shooting a digital video
feature, but also more interesting.

In Conversation is 30 minutes of Miller, Posey, and Balk waxing
philosophical about the film. Sedgwick appears in a separately taped segment as
she wasn't available to sit down with the other three.

Creating Personal Velocity runs 14 minutes and is a raw
behind-the-scenes video of the film's production. It's humorous while also
giving decent insight into the production's run 'n' gun nature.

Closing Statement

Personal Velocity stumbles at times in its leap from book to film, but
Rebecca Miller's unsentimental honesty, coupled with standout performances by
three skilled actresses, make it worth 85 minutes of your time.